Beneath a disorganized society lay a devastated land. The destruction of property affected all classes of the population. The accumulated capital of the South had disappeared in worthless Confederate stocks, bonds, and currency. The banks had failed early in the war. Two billion dollars invested in slaves had been wiped out. Factories which had been running before the war, or were developed after 1861 in order to supply the blockaded country, had been destroyed by Federal raiders or seized and sold or dismantled because they had furnished supplies to the Confederacy. Mining industries were paralyzed. Public buildings which had been used for war purposes were destroyed or confiscated for the uses of the army or for the new freedmen's schools. It was months before courthouses, state capitols, school and college buildings were again made available for normal uses. The military school buildings had been destroyed by the Federal forces. Among the schools which suffered were the Virginia Military Institute, the University of Alabama, the Louisiana State Seminary, and many smaller institutions. Nearly all these had been used in some way for war purposes and were therefore subject to destruction or confiscation. The farmers and planters found themselves "land poor." The soil remained, but there was a prevalent lack of labor, of agricultural equipment, of farm stock, of seeds, and of money with which to make good the deficiency. As a result, a man with hundreds of acres might be as poor as a negro refugee. The desolation is thus described by a Virginia farmer: From Harper's Ferry to New Market, which is about eighty miles ... the country was almost a desert.... We had no cattle, hogs, sheep, or horse or anything else. The fences were all gone. Some of the orchards were very much injured, but the fruit trees had not been destroyed. The barns were all burned; chimneys standing without houses, and houses standing without roof, or door, or window. Much land was thrown on the market at low prices--three to five dollars an acre for land worth fifty dollars. The poorer lands could not be sold at all, and thousands of farms were deserted by their owners. Everywhere recovery from this agricultural depression was slow. Five years after the war Robert Somers, an English traveler, said of the Tennessee Valley: It consists for the most part of plantations in a state of semi-ruin and plantations of which the ruin is for the present total and complete.... The trail of war is visible throughout the valley in burnt-up gin-houses, ruined bridges, mills, and factories ... and in large tracts of once cultivated land stripped of every vestige of fencing. The roads, long neglected, are in disorder, and having in many places become impassable, new tracks have been made through the woods and fields without much respect to boundaries.